


More Steel Wire than a Thread

by thenthekneehits



Category: Rhett & Link
Genre: Camping, Fluff, Linkstar, M/M, Sharing a Sleeping Bag, Stargazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 18:36:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,170
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4846040
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenthekneehits/pseuds/thenthekneehits
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>While camping with Rhett in North California, Link’s heart keeps doing weird things.</p>
            </blockquote>





	More Steel Wire than a Thread

**Author's Note:**

> Inspiration from [GMM #192](https://youtu.be/IehGC4_PqPs?t=136) where Rhett joked (maybe) about them sharing a sleeping bag, and [GMMore #588](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dpbvJJb30QQ&t=160) where Link off-handedly mentioned them going camping together on the regular.

At night, Link blankly stared at the shapes that tree branches backed by moonlight formed on the roof of the tent, and his heart wouldn't stop thumping. Don't get him wrong, it was great that it did that and all, but it could serve to do it a little less enthusiastically. He physically felt the entire glob pound up and down his chest where he lay on his back, silently, and he saw his shirt shift along with it. It wasn't beating very fast, just...strong. Purposeful. It forced him to think of the way the organ pushed blood out, down and down his arm all the way to his fingertips, down his torso and legs all the way to his toes, up his shoulder and neck to his brain.

It wasn't a warming thought, like it maybe should have been. It filled Link with cold dread — and that really was a saying for a reason, because his slight shivering intensified from the freezing trails that the thought spread up his spine.

"Dang it," he murmured to himself. He usually fell asleep soon as his head hit the pillow, but the combination of coldness and a strange environment apparently rendered that skill ineffectual.

"Link?" came Rhett's whisper. He enunciated clearly, like he'd been awake.

Link turned his head to the right and saw a tiny glint of light where Rhett's eyes must have been. "Mm?"

"Remember that time we shared a sleeping bag?" the man asked out of nowhere.

"We've never shared a sleeping bag," Link responded, confused. Was Rhett up to something?

"Oh, yeah. We're not supposed to talk about it. I get it," Rhett teased with a chuckle. His ability to laugh at all of his own jokes was really mind-blowing.

"What are you on about? We couldn't even fit in one."

"I bet we could," Rhett taunted.

"What are you doing, man?" Link whispered a bit lower than before.

His heart was still doing _the thing_.

"It's cold," Rhett explained. "It's hard to think, and it's hard to not think and fall asleep."

Link didn't know what to say, so he just turned his face back to the roof of the tent and tried to breathe deeply for a while, in case it would calm his heart down.

"Come into mine," Rhett demanded.

Link didn't move. He wasn't stupid.

"Link." A silent moment. "Mine's bigger," Rhett continued.

Link sighed. "We're not sharing a sleeping bag, Rhett. We're not freezing to death."

Rhett didn't respond. The tent was quiet for long minutes, but Link was even further from sleep than he had been.

Eventually Link heard rustling, and Rhett was getting up.

"Dude, are you seriously-" Link started, heated.

"I just need to pee. Too many beers," Rhett grunted as he hunkered out of the tent.

Too many beers for sure. Rhett had even had a bit of something stronger, but Link hadn't been in the mood for it. He wasn't sure how much Rhett had had, but judging by his strange behavior, it may have been more than Link had thought. Then again, sometimes Rhett just _was_ strange.

Rhett took a long time out there. Link had known him for over 30 years, he knew how long it took for the guy to pee. That's the sort of thing you just knew about your best friend. This was not a regular amount of time.

"Rhett?" Link called out, sitting up a little to get out a louder sound.

Rhett unzipped the entrance and got back into the tent. He was shivering excessively, teeth clanking. "Cold," he noted. Link lay back down, because it looked like Rhett was filming about sixty percent of that.

"It's like 50 degrees," Link argued.

"Just, Link, just come here," Rhett requested as he stood beside his sleeping bag.

"No, Rhett," Link retorted.

"Why? We're alone. Who cares. It's cold."

"So?"

Rhett raised his voice, anger embedding into his tone, "Link!"

"Why are you getting mad at me now?!" Link shouted back.

"You're the one that's arguing!"

Link sat up again, feeling vulnerable as the only one lying down. "If I don't want to share a sleeping bag with you, I don't have to frickin' share one! I draw the line somewhere!"

"What, is your masculinity that fragile or something?"

Link turned his head away. It was a low blow.

Rhett didn't stand the quiet for long. "Least come closer then," he pleaded, but his tone still wasn't very soft.

"Why do I gotta move?"

"Well am _I_ allowed to come closer then, or are you gonna scream about lines some more?"

Link huffed, but mumbled an affirmative.

Rhett grabbed his sleeping bag and set it right next to Link's. The man had been standing out in the open for a few minutes now, but he'd apparently forgotten to shiver during their argument.

"The ground's cold here now!" was the first thing Rhett said as he lay back down, his tone indignant.

"Well, you shouldn't have moved," Link stated impertinently. "Now sleep."

Rhett kept rolling around in his sleeping bag, producing swishy noises, but Link ignored him. He still couldn't get anywhere close to grasping sleep. Judging by the signs, he knew that he had to be keyed up, but he didn't know why. This had happened the last time that the two of them had camped together, too. Link thought that he was fine, nothing to stress about and nothing to look forward to — and those kinds of things usually never bothered his sleep anyway!

Still his heart was beating out of his chest, still his mind was racing a mile a minute even with nothing to think about. He felt strangely hot in a few places, but cold in his extremities, and there was freezing sweat at the top of his spine. His hands were shaking, the smooth synthetic material of the sleeping bag stroking his knuckles without his will. He was _nervous_.

"There were a lotta stars outside," Rhett broke into the quiet.

"Was that why you took so long? Stargazing?"

"Was looking at the Linkstar." Rhett's tone of voice was confusing Link. It was gentle, a high contrast to what it had been like just moments ago during their argument, but there was something else there too.

"You can't spot it off the sky just like that. Doubt it even shows."

"There were so many stars, brother. It showed." Then Rhett said, "we never did go and look at it" with a more plaintive tone.

"We could have brought the telescope along if you'd said so. You can't seriously spot it without the coordinates, right?"

"All the stars they sold were ones you can see with the naked eye. Can't see it in LA though." Rhett’s voice turned into a mumble, "I kinda wan'ed to get ya an extra bright star." It was so quiet that Link felt like it was something he was supposed to ignore, but that Rhett had still wanted him to know.

Therefore he simply said, "Even if we could _see_ it, we couldn't pinpoint it."

"I know approximately where it is, so I was looking in the right direction. If we were still in North Carolina we'd probably see it all the time. Remember how many stars we'd see just right outside? Like, _oh_ , like the time we slept in my backyard!" Rhett's excitement built up quickly.

Link got an image of Rhett's family's backyard; well-kept lawn, flowerbeds partially ruined by three rowdy boys. The peculiar shadows that the two trees set on the ground, backed by thin light. Two sleeping bags set as far from the back door as possible — the boys had felt the need to assert their daring.

The night had still been warm in the late summer, but something had drawn them closer, the need to whisper but still hear, the need to physically feel each other's giggles and twitches, the sight of the other's outline in the dark not enough.

Link had been small and Rhett tall, but the both of them so skinny that they fit into the bigger one's sleeping bag, crammed on their sides, noses close, the fabric stretched taut over Rhett's wider shoulder. Link had still been so young that repetitively twisting his neck to look up at the starry sky hadn't bothered him at all.

"Oh," Link voiced, drawing out the syllable because his breath wavered. "We _have_ shared a sleeping bag!"

Rhett responded with nothing but a "yeah", so low it was hardly more than a breath.

A smile broke out on Link's face, energy bubbling inside him, and he giggled to erupt it. "You were naming all the stars and I thought you were so cool, but now I get that you were frickin' makin' 'em up!" Warm fuzziness comfortably filled him, relaxing his limbs, but his heart still kept its momentum.

He half-saw and half-sensed Rhett's smirk as the man bragged, "You fell for so many things I said."

It happened in a split second. Link was about to respond, but didn't even have time to open his mouth when he was halted by the hit of a new part of the memory. He felt instantly abashed, almost before he even remembered the entirety of the occurrence.

Rhett had named a constellation "the kiss". They had spoken of how neither of them had kissed anyone before. Their noses had happened to brush as Link bowed his head in embarrassment. Rhett had said it was an eskimo kiss. Link had claimed he didn't want to kiss Rhett and that the other boy was gross. Rhett had pressed his nose against Link's again, this time with intent and most likely to tease the smaller boy, and Link had felt like he could never be forgiven for the way he was feeling — for wanting to shift closer. They had just been noses, but he hadn't understood. Or maybe he specifically had.

You know when you instinctively know that another person feels exactly the same way as you do? That was what Link had felt, back then. There had been a connection that Rhett had built with a brush of his nose, a thread that spelled out clear as day that the other boy was feeling just as conflicted, surprised, and _happy_.

Link tried to keep his voice nonchalant as he said "yeah" just so that Rhett wouldn't realize anything was wrong. He kept his eyes firmly up. This was not something they were supposed to talk about.

"You wan' 'o go out and look?" Rhett inquired.

Link couldn't help the urge to hedge a bit. "Was it really cold?"

"It wasn't that cold."

"Earlier you said it was really cold."

"Wasn't that cold," Rhett emphasized.

Link turned to look at Rhett for the first time in a long while. His heart skipped fast for a beat or two, reacting to something he didn't allow himself to consciously think. "Okay," he said anyway.

They got up and hunched over to exit the tent.

Link's right shoulder brushed against Rhett's upper arm where they stood. Rhett lifted his other arm and pointed at the sky, a bit to the left. "That one's Linkstar," he stated.

Link chortled. "No it's not." He didn't even know which star his friend was pointing at, the sky too full of them.

"Well, it's around there," Rhett insisted.

"You're so full of shit," Link countered good-naturedly.

Rhett turned to look down at him, the soft smile on his face clear in the bright starlight. "Guess so," he murmured.

They stood there quietly for a while, not feeling the cold, until eventually their skin began to feel numb and they knew they should go back inside.

"Mine?" Rhett asked as he stood inside the tent, not exactly straight since that was impossible for him. He unzipped his sleeping bag all the way and lay on his back in it, his arms set unnaturally lax at his sides, an invitation.

Link felt weak, like goo, as he fell to his knees and scrambled on top of Rhett's body, chest to chest. He set his face to the warm groove of Rhett's neck, and his friend stirred just to close the zipper, then wrapped his arms around Link's back, forming another layer of a cocoon. Link knew Rhett had to feel the intensity of his heartbeat, the organ acting as if it wished to forcibly push out of Link's chest and into the other's. It was finally warm.

Rhett pointed out, "The leaves kinda make the roof look like constellations."

"No they don't." Link couldn't even see them, though, not wanting to lift his head.

"Yeah, they do. See, that one looks like The Kiss."

"No it doesn't." Link's voice gave a stutter in sync with his heartbeat, because he felt the thread for the second time in his life.

"Yeah, it does," Rhett breathed, his mouth much closer now, coaxing Link to turn his face as though it was pulled by physical force.

**Author's Note:**

> I appreciate criticism of any sort?? I want to get better.
> 
> My tumblr: [thenthekneehits](http://thenthekneehits.tumblr.com/)


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